ADFS Upgrade from Win2016 to Win2022

Question

ADFS Upgrade from Win2016 to Win2022

Sudhakar Golve 0

We are working on migrating ADFS from WIndows2016 to Windows2022. We don't have a development environment to start with. As we are working on production we need the complete detailed steps on how to migrate it to windows 2022 without an outage. We have only application Zscaler using ADFS in our organization. We have a different SQL server to hold the information of the application. In current upgrade we want to use the inbuilt SQL server. We are using two webapp proxy servers in DMZ and two regular servers.

Carolyne 1,151 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2026-03-18T16:19:21.38+00:00

You might need to stand up new Windows Server 2022 AD FS nodes and join them to the existing farm in mixed mode (no outage), validate Zscaler auth, then migrate the farm to Windows Internal Database (WID) by removing the SQL‑backed nodes only after all 2022 nodes are active; finally raise the Farm Behavior Level once 2016 servers are decommissioned.

Zero‑downtime WAP cutover: Deploy new 2022 WAP servers, establish proxy trust with the same federation service name/cert, add them behind the existing load balancer, validate external sign‑in, then remove the old WAPs—keeping both WAP sets briefly ensures no outage.

Your answer

Carolyne 1,151 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2026-03-18T16:19:21.38+00:00

You might need to stand up new Windows Server 2022 AD FS nodes and join them to the existing farm in mixed mode (no outage), validate Zscaler auth, then migrate the farm to Windows Internal Database (WID) by removing the SQL‑backed nodes only after all 2022 nodes are active; finally raise the Farm Behavior Level once 2016 servers are decommissioned.

Zero‑downtime WAP cutover: Deploy new 2022 WAP servers, establish proxy trust with the same federation service name/cert, add them behind the existing load balancer, validate external sign‑in, then remove the old WAPs—keeping both WAP sets briefly ensures no outage.